Heroku: Announcing the Add-on Provider Program | Hacker News Reader

Heroku: Announcing the Add-on Provider Program

blog.heroku.com

90 pointsjnl16 comments

Free idea here. Create an add-on that monitors your load and tells you when you've probably got too many workers and dynos.

Credit goes to the guy who got stuck with the $1300 Heroku bill... he inspired this idea.

link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1688904

This is such a good and obviously needed idea that it makes me want to run out and implement it tonight. (No guarantees that I'll do it, but I'm 100% sure someone will.)

an addon might be overkilled. try the heroku gem.

you can check out the example here: http://github.com/pedro/delayed_job/tree/autoscaling

for worker, you might have to track the number of jobs in your queue. for dyno, you might have to track the number of requests you get within a time period.

Even easier would be an add-on that allows you to bump up your resources for a pre-determined time period, after which they return to baseline values.

That way there would be no need for further user intervention at all.

Is anyone else stunned at how thorough and complete the documentation and support materials are for this launch?

I was blown away. Great job guys!

Definitely. I was just playing with kensa, which is a tool that they wrote for automatically testing your add-on. It checks to make sure everything is working properly. This includes your settings manifest, provisioning services, deprovisioning services, making sure the add-on is secure, etc.

I'm waiting for the recursive add-on: Someone creates an add-on, hosts it on Heroku and then enables the add-on in the add-on app.

I'm already building an addon as a Heroku app. Of course, I work for Heroku, so it probably doesn't count.

You're missing an important detail: Start using the add-on in the Heroku app. Since the add-on provides feature x, you can simply depend on it and remove feature x from the Heroku app :-)

Way ahead of you. The tricky part is being able to bootstrap if the service crashes. It's pretty neat being able to basically provide artificial respiration for your web app in an emergency.

The add-on that I've built has the provisioning system and server management portion on Heroku.

I didn't see (from a quick reading of the docs) how developers get paid: via Heroku, or a direct charge to end users?

It's via Heroku. They handle customer management and billing, and send revenue to you (after taking a cut).

70% for you, 30% for Heroku.

I'm kind of disappointed at the "neutral marketplace" philosophy. I'd prefer a "curated marketplace" where the Herokuans could be opinionated about what works best (in general, and with Heroku). Metrics are great but I actually value the opinion of the people who built and run Heroku more. (Of course their opinion could be a metric, but it didn't sound like it in the announcement.)

Notifo definitely needs to get on this..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com